Signs are used to convey information. For example, in the real estate industry, information about pending home sales, open houses, and the like, must be effectively conveyed to potential home buyers or other interested individuals. Other industries such as furniture outlet stores, mattress stores, automobile shops—among many others—use temporary signage to promote special discounts or ongoing promotional offers. Once a home has sold (or the special discount or promotional offer has ended) the signs used to convey the information may be taken down, transported to another location, or simply stored for later use. There are numerous other examples where temporary signs can enhance an ability to convey information; for example, consider home based business parties, tasting parties, small business advertising, among other possibilities—these and other diverse industries are in need of improved temporary signage.
Transporting a sign can be a problem. For example, signs used in the real estate industry are generally bulky and difficult to fit into a vehicle, let alone a trunk or other storage compartment. Quite often more than one sign must be arranged within one vehicle, sometimes dozens of signs at a time, because real estate professionals often like to place multiple signs at various locations around a neighborhood to create a virtual detour to direct traffic toward an open house (i.e., toward a home for sale). Moreover, real estate agents or other real estate sales professionals generally avoid driving large vehicles, such as pick-up trucks or sport utility vehicles; instead, they are more likely to drive client-friendly vehicles such as a luxury sedan or compact car, which are more conducive to frequent travel between homes or other locations, and are generally less expensive to fuel and maintain than larger vehicles. Thus, the real estate agents or other real estate sales professionals are left to their own particular struggles of trying to fit bulky real estate signs into a smaller-type vehicle, generally into a trunk of the vehicle.
Time is a precious commodity. The time taken to disassemble or assemble a sign is time that could be spent elsewhere, perhaps more productively. This is particularly true for a general manager of a store, for example, who may want to convey important information to prospective customers for a temporary period of time, perhaps by placing a sign on a sidewalk in front of the store, but may not want to spend an inordinate amount of time to assemble and disassemble the sign between each temporary period of time. For example, the general manager may have a special promotional offer once every month for one week out of the month. For the one week out of the month having the special promotional offer, the general manager would need to locate, assemble, and place the sign in the desired path of the prospective customers, and then disassemble and store the sign after the special promotional offer has ended. Even more burdensome, the general manager may choose to have the special promotional offer for one hour out of every day, for example. In that case, the sign would need to be assembled, placed, and disassembled every day.
This is not much different than the real estate industry where real estate agents or other professionals are constantly relocating signs as a result of placing homes on the market for sale, and removing homes from the market because they have either sold or because the owner has given up trying to make the sale. As another example, the real estate agent may want to put an open house sign in front of a home each Sunday (or some other day of the week) when people are more likely to want to browse the interior of the home, and then take the sign down when the open house has ended, transport the sign to a new location, and repeat the routine.
Conventional signs are often not very versatile, nor are they generally able to withstand the elements. For example, a gusty wind can cause a sign to tip over, spin around, or twist so that a potential onlooker fails to see the writing or drawings on the sign. This can lead to lost sales, decreased revenues, and even worse—layoffs or a complete closure of a business.
Accordingly, a need remains for an improved sign for conveying information; in particular, a need remains for an improved collapsible sign that is easily transportable and can withstand the elements.